By Stacey Patton

I’m still grappling with my disappointment with “White People,” the provocative and sobering play written by J.T. Rodgers, which explores the explosive issue of racism in American life.  While the play was touted as “a candid look at race in America,” the all-white cast of characters didn’t tell me anything new.
Since I saw the final New York performance this past weekend at the Atlantic Stage in Chelsea, I’ve been asking myself whether I should be applauding the characters for cracking open their souls to tell us how they honestly feel about people of color, or if I should still be deeply disturbed that this performance, which played out before a room full of white people, generated countless chuckles but no clear signs of outrage or embarrassment from the audience, or growth from the characters.

To understand racism, one has to be willing to step into some dark and perverse mindsets and learn not to take the distortions of others personally.  As a student of history, I’ve come to realize that the racial projections of others bare no real truth about me nor my people, but they do expose a great deal about the fears, anxieties, fantasies and sickness of their proprietors.  And racism itself is not something that is static or unchanging.  It morphs, evolves over time, and pivots around larger social, economic, and political transformations in our society.

“White People” reaffirmed those lessons for me.

The play explores the separate perspectives of three white people from three different geographical regions.  The characters never meet but they share a mutual bond – they all struggle with what it means to be white in 21st century America.  In a trio of monologues, they grapple fear, vulnerability, entitlement, and prejudice as they shift back and forth between guilt, anger and denial.

First there is Mara Lynn Dodson (Rebecca Brooksher), a poor housewife from Fayetteville, North Carolina with a heavy southern drawl who constantly reminds the audience that she is not ignorant.  Mara is a former beauty queen who marries Earl, a high school stud turned truck driver with a beer gut.  Throughout her scenes she yells and threatens to whip her epileptic son who is about to undergo radical and dangerous brain surgery to halt his seizures. The surgery is to be performed by Dr. Singh, an Indian neurosurgeon who is the “only hope” for the couple’s son.

Mara loathes sitting in front of the Indian doctor’s desk looking at pictures of his smiling wife and children who appear to have a sense of limitless possibilities twinkling in their eyes. Her perception is that the Indian doctor looks down on her because she is poor white trash, just as a former black classmate turned bank manager looks right through her when the woman tells her that her account is overdrawn. And there is her husband’s whip-cracking Latino foreman who makes her scream: “We (meaning white people) were here first!  That means something.  They (black, brown, and yellow people) should get in line and wait their turn.”

Alan Harris (Michael Shulman) is a tweed jacket wearing prototypical professor from Brooklyn who gives passionate lectures glorifying Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged Dutch racist who governed New Amsterdam in the 17th century.  He is fascinated by one particular student, a black woman named Felicia who hails from Bed-Stuy. She wears baggy pants and earrings the size of “small planets,” pops gum, and has hood slang in her lexicon. “Since when did stupid mean good?” Alan jokes.

Though Felicia is a brilliant student who unnerves him by drilling holes in his lectures, Alan can’t help but think of her as a drug dealer or somebody’s “baby mama.” His fascination with Felicia changes one evening when he and his pregnant wife are attacked by a group of black men. The day after the attack he looks at a smiling Felicia in class and fights the urge to call her a “dirty, stupid n-gg–!”

Last, there is the Brooklyn-born Martin Bahmueller (John Dossett), a pompous attorney at a prestigious St. Louis law firm.  Martin has always played by the rules. He is a suit-and-tie kind of guy who speaks correctly and believes in conformity.  He moved his family away from the big city to escape the noise and habits of colored people and to protect and preserve his children’s prospects.

“Don’t give me this crap about ‘white flight,’” he huffs at the audience, explaining his decision to move to the suburbs.  It’s called “self-preservation,” he says; something that human groups have been doing since the beginning of time.

Martin complains about the black guys working in the mail room who blast violent and misogynist rap music, sport gold teeth and baggy pants, and bagger the English language.  Yet his own son listens to head banging music and commits a horrific hate crime.  Martin’s son rapes a black woman and then stuffs a piece of torn notebook paper into her vagina with the words: “Kill all c–t n-g-rs!” scrawled in ink. “N – i – g – e -r,” Martin notes for the audience.  His son couldn’t even spell the n-word correctly.

As I watched these three white people spill their guts, their mouths spittling and their faces and necks reddening, I kept wondering if they were really acting or if they were using the theatre as a vehicle to tell other white people in the audience that they feel their pain.  I heard them use phrases like: “We will not disappear.” “Don’t tell me about history.” “Fight the good fight.” “Keep the faith.”

The characters never take responsibility for their own failures and racist beliefs.  Somehow, as the play’s title suggests, they are supposed to broadly represent the souls of white people but they lack nuance and fall victim to stereotype. It is all those people of color who assert themselves and vie for the equal opportunities that America promises are the problem. They are to blame for Mara’s poverty, sick baby, and her crude Hillbilly husband.  All those black, brown, and yellow people are to blame for Alan and Martin’s feeling of inadequacy, loss of control, and crisis in identity.  None of these characters evolves or moves the audience to a better place of understanding and hope for improved race relations.

When the lights came on, my eyes met the eyes of an Asian woman and the three other blacks in the small theatre. We exchanged no words.  Stunned, we simply shook our heads and grinned. As I left the theatre I wondered if this was the kind of open and honest dialogue that Attorney General Eric Holder is calling on Americans to have about race?

If so, then no wonder “we’re a nation of cowards.”

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor/Writer for TheDefendersOnline and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.